When it comes to lecture recording, the University of Osnabruck in Northern Germany offers a unique blend of long-lasting experience, technological innovation, various research efforts around the user experience, a dedicated didactical perspective and enthusiasm with the service they provide. Markus Ketterl and the virtUOS team (virtual University of Osnabruck) support their institution with innovative technologies in academia and administration since 2002.
The team collaborates intensely with researchers from the University of Osnabruck (Prof. Oliver Vornberger, to name one) and their lecture recording solution virtPresenter was one of the most prominent results of that cooperation. VirtPresenter served the needs of the lecturers at Osnabruck and other institutions of the ELAN - E-Learning Academic Network in Lower Saxony, Germany and was also used for conference recordings and general video management. Furthermore, virtPresenter was the matrix upon which many research projects evolved to look into the effectiveness of lecture recording, its actual use and various technologies to enhance the experience beyond the mere presentation of a recorded lecture (user tracking, media analysis).
This background made Osnabruck an obvious choice when it came to launching the Matterhorn project in 2009. Their focus is very much towards the Engage user interface (UI), but with the various skills in their team, they also contributed towards the capture agent, the distribution technologies and the Admin tools – and they coordinated the UI/User Experience (UX)/design work with the colleagues from Cataluña and Berkeley. At the same time, team members also invested into related projects around the classroom infrastructure like a camera tracking system and a zoom player to record and display the blackboard in high quality.
As for their deployment, Osnabruck decided not to do things halfway: For the autumn semester starting in October, they went Matterhorn all the way with 4 virtual machines and 6 capture agents to record 15 regular courses a week plus one or other event off schedule, conferences mainly. And they decided to go with the latest, slightly modified version of Matterhorn from trunk in order to take advantage of the most recent features. This courageous approach was even more daring in light of the ambitions of their long-time customers: With their virtPresenter, the virtUOS team had built a large, yet demanding customer base throughout the years amongst instructors and students alike, so expectations were fairly high when it came to the new, Matterhorn-based solution.
In the classroom, the capture agents were enhanced with the infamous kangaroo-patch to overcome the problem of a missing VGA input, mainly for the time between the start of the recording (i.e. a couple of minutes before the nominal start of class) and the instructor actually connecting a computer. This alternative to the hardware-based scaler solution worked out fine after some initial problems related to other (software) issues.
The backend services run on Centos 5 VM in a distributed environment for Admin, Engage and 2 Workers, producing a variety of formats with the latest version of FFmpeg for the numerous distribution channels Osnabruck serves. Starting with a couple of TB for storage, IT services have now allocated more than 10 TB to meet the growing demand.
For their distribution needs, Matterhorn was integrated with the open source Learning Management System Stud.IP and their media portal Lernfunk – with iTunes U distribution on top. Currently, the Red5 streaming solution is replaced by progressive download for performance reasons, helping to satisfy all distribution needs – including the engage UI, the embedded player (for the LMS and the Lernfunk portal), and iTunes U in its European setting.
Overall, Osnabruck had a tough time throughout the first couple of weeks of the semester, mainly due to the amount of customization and the short time span to test 1.0 towards the semester. But after a couple of weeks into the semester, their ambition to serve all existing requirements and satisfy their exigent customers were realized with Matterhorn – and an additional effort from virtUOS team members, who are looking forward not only to the holiday season, but to the end of an exiting first semester ride with Matterhorn.
